David: Do you see email declining over the next few years with threats from spam, spyware, and other malware attacks? What's the real level of email use in business.

Marie: Not a chance -- impossible as it seems, the volume of email is going to keep going up. The Radicati Group says that the email client base will increase from 1.9 billion seats in 2006 to nearly 3.6 billion seats in 2010, representing an average annual growth rate of 18%. Over the next seven years, it's been estimated that a company with 20,000 employees will have to save approximately 4.5 billion emails. Imagine the complexity involved in just ensuring that the right emails are retained for the right period of time. Now imagine searching through all that archived content if there's an audit, legal discovery order or similar request.

For the record, the ePolicy Institute reports the following scary statistics:

• 21% of employee email subpoenaed by courts & regulators.
• 13% of companies have battled lawsuits triggered by employee email.
• 65% of companies lack email retention policies.
• 94% of companies fail to retain & archive IM.
• 46% of companies offer employees no email policy training.
• 50% of workplace instant messages users send/receive is risky content including attachments, jokes, gossip, confidential info, and porn.

David: Who are your competitors? Don't IBM and Legato offer similar solutions? How are you different?

Marie: There are other vendors in this market. However, most entered this space to address operational issues, as in, "How do I reduce the size of users' mailboxes?" That requires a fundamentally different approach to archiving in order to retain irrefutable copies of email for regulatory or governance issues. So our technology went out of the door from Day 1 to address not just operational issues but also compliance and governance. This meant that from Day 1, our solution addressed scalability, performance, records management, chain of custody, litigation support, etc.

David: You see business communication en-mass. What does the future hold for business communication in five years and ten years? Will we see more or less of email? Will there be issues of tracking IMs, VOIP, and other technologies?

Marie: In the near term one big issue will be instant messaging. There's an entire generation now entering the workplace that communicates constantly through IM, yet most of it is never archived or even captured. And since people might feel more comfortable in this medium, the content is more frank, which makes it ripe for e-discovery. On the flip side, companies have trouble complying with such e-discovery because they don't capture the content.

Looking forward, it's possible to envision a kind of business where every kind of business communication -- phone calls, workplace audio-video, keystrokes -- is captured, digitized and archived. And it could all end up in court.